March

America is a parade.  This idea marched into my mind a few weeks ago while sitting along a street in Herrick, Illinois. My family and I, along with a few hundred other people enjoying the pleasant July morning, were lined up to watch the town’s annual Independence Day parade.

 We watched fire departments roll slowly by in their giant red machines.  We watched the war veterans march stoically while the young boy scouts stepped lightly to a cadence inaudible to grown-up ears.  We watched the politicians shake hands and the pageant queens wave.  Historic tractors chortled; classic muscle cars flexed.

America, it occurred to me, is very much a parade; a colorful, gleaming, tremendous parade, full of all kinds of people sitting atop all kinds of floats, riding all kinds of horses, driving all kinds of vehicles, all moving down the same road.

The thing about parades, though, is that no matter how long they seem to march, eventually they all end.  Before the hour is done, the sirens usually go quiet and the flashing lights are gone.

People on TV and the radio talk in great detail and often with weird enthusiasm about the decline and inevitable end of this republic.  They talk about the chaos in Iraq and the weakening of the American dollar, about the inadequacy of our institutions and the crumbling of our cities.

One thing, however, that is rarely mentioned, is the overall peculiarity of America in the first place.  Throughout much of human history, people grouped themselves almost exclusively along ethnic identity.  That is one reason we see so much turmoil in places like Iraq.  It is not that the vast majority of Shiite’s or Sunnis or Kurds are inherently bad or crazy.  The intense violence is due partly to the fact that for much of their history, the concept of voluntarily sharing a prize of land defined by often arbitrary and even foreign-designed boundaries was not an option.

They are a tribal people, and I can say that without fear of being called a bigot because I’ll say it about us, too.  I’ll say it about myself.  We are all a tribal people.   We like to hang out with people with whom we have something in common.  After all, even in a small town parade, the dueling candidates do not ride on the same float. 

To be fair, though, we must acknowledge that tribes have lived in semi-peaceful coexistence before 1776.  Rome, for example, kept its factions relatively inert for centuries, and our dearly departed super villain Saddam Hussein even succeeded in keeping Iraq from strangling itself, albeit by using heavy-handed techniques.

But in America, we have multiple tribes of people—and you can define the term however you would like—living together voluntarily.

Taking the long view of history, that is something of a new idea.  We aren’t living together because we’ve been conquered by an emperor we’ll never see, or because a beret-wearing dictator will torture us to death if we mess up. We are living together mostly by choice. 

Now, some might argue with that.  They might suggest, and accurately so, that the vast majority of Americans were simply born within these borders.  They might skewer the analogy and suggest that riding atop a float one has not built is not much to shout about in the first place, anyway.  These are both reasonable arguments. 

However, think about the most pompous, most vitriolic radio or TV personality you can imagine.  By listening to them blather, you would imagine they have their passports out and their luggage packed.  You might imagine, or perhaps even hope, that they are leaving the country as soon as the cameras stop rolling.

But they don’t move away to another country.

They stay.  They continue to march.

They march, because even though they might not like the people they are walking with, although they might despise the floats around them, they still think that the parade, in and of itself, is a pretty good parade.  They think the basic ideas that make up the parade route are actually pretty good, too.  They aren’t walking down the road at the end of a gun or a legion of speared soldiers. They are walking by choice. 

I think one reason we often get so upset with our elected leaders is that we carry around this misconception that equates America with its government.  The thing is, though, the President is not our parade marshal.  Congress and the Supreme Court don’t even have a float.  They are the folks walking behind the horses with the brooms.  They all can be and someday will be replaced, but the parade will remain.  The parade marches on.

            One of the first entries in Herrick’s parade was the Pana Fire Department.  Following  behind their line of dress-uniformed firefighters rolled a pickup truck, and in the back of that truck stood a frayed steel girder.  This steel came from one of the buildings destroyed during the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City.  As most of us remember, thousands of firefighters, police officers and emergency personnel chose to risk their lives that day to help save their fellow citizens.  Many of them died.

            Those men from Pana chose to be firefighters.  They volunteer to risk their lives.  Less dramatically, they even chose to march in the parade.  Everyone in the parade gets that choice, because a parade, by its very nature, is voluntary.

            That is something to consider the next time we don’t like what we see around us.  All of America is that parade.  We don’t have to just sit and watch, or, like children, fight over tossed candy. 

            We can also volunteer.  We can make a float or beat a drum.  We can ride a horse, or, if we think we’re up for the challenge, try to walk behind the horses with a broom.

            America is a parade, so march.